Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion.  He had the lay of the land in his mind.  He had never seen it in midwinter, but the snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not confuse him.

From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.  The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deep and narrow gash in the white-clad hills.  On his right opened the broader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.

For a space of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.  Then he was reminded of his immediate necessities by the chill that crept over his feet,—­for several inches of snow overlaid the planked surface of the landing float.

Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson’s Bay freight canoe, a capacious shoal-water craft with high topsides.  He slid this off the float, loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern, paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting current of a river.

Here, under the steep shoulder of a mountain, rows of piles stood gaunt above the tide flats.  When Hollister had last seen the mouth of the Toba, those same piles had been the support of long boom-sticks, within which floated hundreds of logs.  On the flat beside the river there had stood the rough shacks of a logging camp.  Donkey engines were puffing and grunting in the woods.  Now the booming ground was empty, save for those decaying, teredo-eaten sticks, and the camp was a tumbledown ruin when he passed.  He wondered if the valley of the Toba were wholly deserted, if the forests of virgin timber covering the delta of that watercourse had been left to their ancient solitude.  But he did not stop to puzzle over this.  In ten minutes he was over the sandy bar at the river’s mouth.  The sea was hidden behind him.  He passed up a sluggish waterway lined by alder and maple, covered with dense thickets, a jungle in which flourished the stalwart salmonberry and the thorny sticks of the devil’s club.  Out of this maze of undergrowth rose the tall brown columns of Douglas fir, of red cedar, of spruce and hemlock with their drooping boughs.

Sloughs branched off in narrow laterals, sheeted with thin ice, except where the current kept it open, and out of these open patches flocks of wild duck scattered with a whir of wings.  A mile up-stream he turned a bend and passed a Siwash rancheria.  The bright eyes of little brown-faced children peered shyly out at him from behind stumps.  He could see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of an open-fronted smokehouse.  Around another bend he came on a buck deer standing knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animal snorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.

Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.  His objective lay some six miles up-stream.  But when he came at last to the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slack water new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres of logs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lesser craft moored to these timbers.  A little back from the bank he could see the roofs of buildings.